How to Fail: Everything I’ve Ever Learned From Things Going Wrong

by Elizabeth Day

To which my response is, it’s not that I’m actively advocating failure. It’s that we will all experience it at some juncture in our lives and that instead of fearing failure as a calamity from which it is impossible to recover, maybe we can build up the muscle of our emotional resilience by learning from others. That way, the next time something goes wrong, we are better equipped to deal with it.

Words were used sparingly and often carried symbolic, historic importance. The closest city to where we lived was referred to as Londonderry on the road signs, but to use its full name in conversation was to make a political statement that you were pro-British. You had to refer to it as Derry or risk the consequences.

Still, I didn’t much like school. I always felt resentful that I wasn’t in control of my own life. I wanted, more than anything, to be an adult and in charge of my own existence. I was impatient to get on with things, to have a job, to live in my own flat and pay my own rent. In fact, I couldn’t wait to leave.

But this social failure at school had some positive by-products. At an early age, it made me into an observer of human behaviour. I started to listen more than I talked. It’s a skill that has been incredibly useful as a writer. And because I wasn’t born cool but had to learn how to fake it, I like to think I have a degree of empathy for others who have never felt they belonged.

That, it seems, is what connects all these stories: the lesson that, in order to survive, one needs either to adapt to a potentially hostile environment or to redirect one’s pain into a more positive – and often creative – outlet. It strikes me that school is not simply a place where academic lessons are taught but also a place where we educate ourselves on who we are; where we can try out different identities and see what fits before the constraints and responsibilities of adulthood are upon us.

Schooldays were categorically not the best days of my life and, in fact, I still have nightmares about them.

Failure to fit in at an early age teaches us to develop a resilience that can ultimately help us flourish.

So what do we learn from failing to fit in? We learn how to cope with social rejection. We learn how to entertain ourselves. We learn independence and empathy and we put our imagination to better use than we might have done otherwise. We learn how to handle bullies and people who don’t like us. We learn strategies that help us acclimatise to new environments. We learn to code-switch between different social languages. We learn not to let our mother cut our hair beyond an appropriate point.

The biggest lesson I took from it all was that the secret to succeeding at tests is not, actually, to get a fantastic mark. Succeeding at a test means not defining yourself according to the outcome. It means reminding yourself that you exist separately from those ticks in the margin and that most of life is an arbitrary collision of serendipitous or random events and no one is awarding you percentage points for how you live it.

had been an inveterate fan of the 1990s TV drama This Life, which followed the lives and loves of twenty-something lawyers who sported cool hair and cracked jokes like pistachio shells.

I was in a long-term relationship that wasn’t serious enough to lead to marriage and wasn’t fun enough to be casual.

In many ways, it turned out that we were too similar, that our romantic pathologies were twisted into the same shapes by past experiences, when actually what you need in a long-term partner is strength in the places you’re weak, and vice versa. Your experiences need to dovetail, rather than shadow each other.

In fact, the older I got, the more it became apparent to me that sport – and exercise more generally – was not just a question of winning or losing, or of being judged for it, but a way of feeling stronger in myself.

What a gift that is: to move, to feel, to be. It makes me think, after so long trying to shrink my size, how radical it might be to cherish it.

think it was also the first time I found that working hard wasn’t necessarily going to always result in the right result, because I prepared. Whenever I had job interviews I prepared like a demon; I prepared seriously hard for that interview as well. And at school if you prepare really hard and revise really hard, generally, you’ll always come out fine. That was what I had always found. So I treated it like revising, preparing for an exam.

Most importantly: a friend doesn’t owe you anything. A friend has not made a commitment, has not signed a contract or walked down the aisle and promised to love you until death do you part. A friend does not need to do anything or be anyone in order to make you feel better about yourself. Of course, the greatest friends do this anyway, but it is not their job and you should not expect it of them.

The truest advice is given only when asked for, because the act of asking means your friend is willing and ready to receive it. If a friend of mine had sat me down before my marriage and told me they were worried I was doing the wrong thing (and, believe me, several of them wanted to), I would not have listened and I would have held it against them. I would have felt judged and humiliated and I wouldn’t have understood because I needed to go through that experience and emerge on the other side in order to get what they were saying. In this, as in so many other instances in my life, it turned out my friends knew me far better than I knew myself.

There are few things more annoying than the high-maintenance acquaintance who makes you feel bad by prefacing every interaction with ‘It’s been AGES. Where have you BEEN?’

As I’ve grown to understand myself better, I’ve also grown to know which are the friends I can truly rely on in times of crisis and who want the best for me as opposed to the friends who were more circumstantial and who attached themselves to a particular period of my life.

But maybe they should also have been teaching us about the natural limits of fertility too, rather than treating it as a luscious field of endless bounty full of ovary-shaped flowers that one only had to graze accidentally with one’s fingertips in order to fall pregnant with quadruplets

‘Adventures do by definition involve risk, but not having an adventure means missing out on life, a far greater risk.’

An angry woman is seen as shrewish, unlikeable and out of control – a harpy at the mercy of her dangerously inexplicable emotions. An angry man is often seen as righteous, masculine – a powerful male archetype who uses his fury to defend and protect.